BHASHINI vs Sarvam AI vs BharatGen vs SEA-LION
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
| BH BHASHINI India's government platform for AI translation and speech in Indian la... Visit |
Sarvam AI
India's sovereign LLM, built for 22 Indian languages
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BharatGen
Government-funded Indic language and speech models led by IIT Bombay
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SEA-LION
AI Singapore's open-weight LLMs tuned for Southeast Asian languages
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 6 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Freemium | Open Source | Free | Open Source |
| Free tier | Free API access for proof-of-concept only, after organisation registration and approval; production use requires a paid agreement | Open Apache-2.0 model weights (Sarvam-30B / 105B) | Free model downloads on Hugging Face; flagship Param2 and speech models are non-commercial research licence, smaller Param-1 and domain models Apache 2.0 | All weights free on Hugging Face; a free trial API key at 10 requests a minute for proofs of concept |
| Paid from | Production or commercial API use: paid version, pricing on request from the Bhashini team | Sarvam 105B API from ₹29.28 per million input tokens | — | No paid tier: production runs on cloud partners at their own rates |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | India's government-chosen sovereign LLM | — | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant |
| Founded | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2023 |
| Maker | Digital India Corporation (MeitY), Government of India | Sarvam AI | BharatGen Technology Foundation (IIT Bombay; funded by DST and IndiaAI Mission) | AI Singapore |
| Verdict | BHASHINI is a serious public investment in Indian-language AI, with broad language coverage and real deployments across government services, from grievance redress to Aadhaar and railway enquiries. Its APIs are free only... |
Sarvam is the most credible vehicle for India's sovereign-AI push: Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B were trained end-to-end on IndiaAI compute, cover 22 Indian languages, and ship under Apache-2.0, so builders can self-host wi... |
BharatGen is a nine-institution research consortium led from IIT Bombay with Indian government funding. Its flagship Param2 is a 17B mixture-of-experts model trained from scratch and covering English plus all 22 schedule... |
SEA-LION is the open model family to start with for Southeast Asian language work: regularly updated, MIT-licensed in its newest releases, and evaluated on SEA-HELM, the regional benchmark its own team maintains. The Sep... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.